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Publishing

Boob Book: The Newest Bu$ine$$ Plan

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Today I need to begin work on cornering a $20,000 business grant, which would nicely support and (more important!) market the Boob Book.

The three big projects now at hand:

  • Write and rehearse a script for the application video (the application is a video)
  • Interview three women to grab sound bites for said video
  • Recast the existing table of contents and chapter outline to reflect the new approach conceived for the book

The grant is for small businesses in Arizona and Colorado; the main prize is 20 grand, which of course would make any small bidness owner ecstatic, and the runner-up prize is $3,500…a figure that would be extremely helpful in itself.

Luckily, Plain & Simple Press is an imprint of The Copyeditor’s Desk, which is an incorporated business and has been so since 2000 and ought-10. The pitch I’m going to present is that the book will set the business on course to full-blown success and allow me to hire ever so many underlings.

The new approach I’m going to take to the book — which will be pretty easy with the material already in hand — is to present it as a guide for women who have received a breast cancer diagnosis to the many (one might say “endless”) decisions you have to make along the way.

Every chapter can readily be set up in terms of decisions: At this point you have to decide…A or B. At the next point, you’ll need to decide…C or D or E. And so on. Each woman’s decisions need to be informed by fact and by her own preferences and circumstances. And her decisions may be illuminated by other women’s experience.  Each chapter can present a decision, summarize the facts and advice that we know today, and point readers to sources where they can get more in-depth information.

One of my former students was an audio major. He’s taken a course in videography and he has some equipment. So I’ve already roped him in to helping out with this project. And I’ve already made contact with three breast cancer “survivors” who are willing to speak in front of a camera.

As usual, I’m not holding my breath until the money rolls in. But…as a practical matter, the proposal does have a chance of succeeding. P&S Press, as a subentity of The Copyeditor’s Desk, Inc., is a verifiable business. And this new approach I’ve come up with will create a genuinely useful work for women who are blindsided (as we all are, unless we have enough cancer-ridden relatives to clue us to a genetic problem) by a diagnosis of breast cancer, DCIS, or LCIS.

We shall see!

New Book a-Bornin’

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make-time-for-writing-tipsBelieve it or not, I have a new book in draft. And this is one that a) I wish to use as a tool for marketing the others and b) I suspect will sell smartly in its own right.

After watching the book marketing industry and testing its waters, I’ve come to think that probably the best way for a self-publishing scribbler to sell books is face-to-face. Person-to-person. Business to Business. That would be through a variety of speaking engagements in front of groups whose members might be interested in whatever one is selling, and by bringing the book to sell it on the spot.

Far more profitable, though, is helping others self-publish books. There are a lot of good reasons to self-publish — none of which include becoming a famous best-selling writer who makes enough on her genre novels to quit her day job. For example:

  • Many a manufacturer can use an informational book for customers or retailers.
  • Nonprofits and churches can raise funds with any number of books, whether they’re related to their mission or cookbooks for supporters.
  • A town’s history society also can raise funds and support its mission with a local or regional history.
  • A family planning a reunion might collect stories and facts about the family’s history and produce it, for the event, in book form.
  • Genealogy enthusiasts can gather all the dope on the ancestors and produce their findings in books to hand down to the grandchildren.
  • Doctors, dentists, and veterinarians can profitably produce patient information in book form.
  • Lawyers also put out books of client information.
  • A paperback or coil-bound book is a convenient way to gather and produce employee training materials.
  • How-to instructions, whether for workers or for people who buy products, lend themselves to book format.

The Copyeditor’s Desk is already doing just that: producing print-on-demand books for clients who want them for specific purposes.

So I propose to suggest this service to businesses and nonprofit groups around the city, by attending meetings where managers are likely to show up and explaining what they might have to say and how they can say it in a book. And why.

The subject of the current work in progress is why, what, and how to self-publish. In it, I argue that Amazon is a scam, just like all the other scams that exploit people who think they want to be a Writer with a Capital W.  The highest and best use of a self-published book is not as something to sell on Amazon.

Cobbled together from two blogs and a book I published some years ago, it’s already at 395 pages, and I still have a half-dozen chapters to write out of whole cloth.

LOL! I figure when some business owner or lawyer who covets a book to peddle his services sees a 400-page tome on how to do it, he’ll figure he’d better hire someone else to do it. Namely, moi!

😀

Seriously: I had no idea I’d written so much on the subject! By the time I transferred content from the published book (which I’ve reused many times for courses and so had in PDF and even, in some cases, in Word format) and then added in as many blog posts from Plain & Simple Press and FaM, the thing came to over 460 pages.

Cut about 70 pages, but then had to add some content to fill in a few lacunae. There’s more material that I can cut, but I’ll need some time and space to think about it. But nevertheless, I’m afraid the thing will come in at right around 400 pages.

Whether that’s an advantage or a disadvantage remains to be decided.

Occurred to me to break it into several books. However, the Amazon experience at serializing Fire-Rider gives the lie to the conventional wisdom about spoon-feeding readers in baby bites. Three books = three times as much cost, three times as much work, and three times as much hassle to produce, print, digitize, and market. I really think I’d druther focus on trying to peddle one book than two or three.

 Of 66 chapters, 18 remain to be written or massively rewritten. Or maybe not massive; a few just need some edits. But even if I average all of one per day, that’s only 18 days of work!

Then another two days of formatting. In the meanwhile, I’ll be trying to hustle up some speaking engagements. Since it only takes about two or three days for Author2Market to print a PoD opus, I should be able to get it out in fairly short order.

 

The Next Big Project: A New Writing Book

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So I propose to a new young editor at Columbia, a pup who doesn’t know me from Adam’s Off Ox (what’s an off ox, anyway?), that we should do a new edition of The Essential Feature. He gives me a brush-off. I think, eff you, you little twit, and lay a new set of plans.

This effing of him comes easily, because in the meantime some other plans are afoot. Pretty clearly I need to get off my duff, abandon the evidently futile social media, and show up in front of living human beings to peddle my bookish wares.

And what, yea verily what do I have to sell? As Jackie wrestles with masses of content at Plain & Simple Press, we realize that of several content categories, “writing tips” is a) the largest and b) the most appealing on social media.

By extension, I conclude, the large “writing tips” category of my blog and print content probably represents a convenient shoehorn into various public speaking opportunities.

One plan is to try to offer a public-service course for one or more of the community colleges — how to self-publish your own book. Something along those lines could also be offered at the local bookstores, which tend to offer various presentations, and quite frankly I’m very sure I can find venues coming out the wazoo without much effort.

And what do we need to embellish these dog-and-pony shows?

Why…another book, of course!

Come to think of it, I realized that between the more timeless segments of the Columbia book, two yakkity blogs, and lecture material for five courses, there’s plenty of material to cobble together a book about how to write, self-edit, and self-publish your own magnum opus. Yes. You, too, boys and girls, can publish your very own Great Novel (or Great Self-Help) (or Great Memoir)  (or Great Exposé) of the Western World.

Thanks to the “filter” function in WordPress, it didn’t take long to cobble together the skeleton of this thing. A few more hours and it was fleshed out, to the tune of about 85,000 words.

By the time the chaff is trimmed out, it should come to about 60,000 or 70,000 words, a good length for a nonfiction tome like this. I’ve been pouring the candidate material into one of Friedman’s Word book templates…am about 3/4 of the way done at about 43,000 words: 267 pages (so far) in a standard trade-book trim size.

Naturally, after weeks of nothin’ doin’, a new client shows up at the door, smack in the middle of this industrious little project.

He has 26 pages of abstruse academic copy written in, by his admission, darkest Chinglish. Needs it by the 29th. Just now in China it happens to be the 26th. He’s not paying much, but that’s OK: every little bit helps.

So tomorrow &  the next day will be occupied by that project. Good. Which reminds me…my other honored Chinese client owes me a grand. Guess we’ll be importuning her before we start on this guy’s project.

🙂

DUCK! New Incoming Cockamamie Idea!

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Lightning_strike_jan_2007Alas, I seem to be constitutionally prone to coming up with new schemes. It must be a congenital thing…

Did I mention the idea of trying to give presentations at the local independent bookstore by way of getting the word out? The plan is to talk about how to put together and produce a self-published book.

It gets better.

On reflection, I recalled a friend of mine, one of the former firm wives who went back and got an MBA and a CFP and set herself up in business as a financial adviser. She specialized in working with women on retirement planning.

By way of hustling customers, she started doing a short community service course at one of the community college campuses, “Retirement Planning for Women.” Yes. That’s one of the things community colleges do, in the continuing ed department: they offer “community service courses” for the general edification and entertainment of the public. These things don’t carry any college credit, and they’re very short and low-key. And therefore easy to prepare and present.

Well. Why not a community service course on Self-Publishing Your Book?

Mwa ha ha!

First off, if these people are duly impressed, at least some of them will want to buy my books (obviously, they won’t know about Roberta’s emanations). Second…I just happen to have enough content around, thanks to an entire journalism textbook (emitted through a real publishing house) and two blogs to compile a whole new book on writing fiction & nonfiction, blogging for fun and marketing, and how to enjoy the (largely unpaid) “Writing Life.”

Last night I tossed the things into a Wyrd file, copying & pasting madly, and came up with 83,830 words — and that’s without an introduction.

Well, holy maquerel. A typical trade book is 80,000 words.

It’s fairly inexpensive to put one of these things together, as long as you neglect to count the value of your time. I could produce such a book in print-on-demand format, offer it at half-price to people who sign up for the course, and still make a small profit on it. More to the point, though, the thing could direct its readers to Plain & Simple Press, the font of all my non-naughty self-publications, and also itself list everything I have for sale right now.

The copy is in hand. It needs a lot of revision and massaging. But…I think if I sat down and worked hard on it, I could put the thing together in less than a month. What a piece of cake!

I could also take it (along with my other opuses) to proposed public presentations.

There are a lot of good reasons to self-publish a book other than a pie-in-the-sky dream that you’ve written the Great American Novel and all that remains to make you rich and famous is to get it in the public’s hands.

Companies can make good use of print-on-demand technology for customer education, employee training, and marketing. Doctors, dentists, and veterinarians can profit from custom-made books for their patients; ditto lawyers for their clients. Genealogy hobbyists and self-published books: a match made in heaven! Nonprofits can use an inexpensively produced print-on-demand book for fund-raising or publicity. Local history groups, archives, and small museums: print-on-demand is perfect for gathering information to preserve for future generations.

That’s the kind of thing I’d emphasize: what practical things you can do with a self-published book, whether it’s in electronic or print-on-demand format.

I’ll bet I could sell that idea. And with it, I could sell books.

 

Day’s end…at last…almost

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Oh, god…have i ever been this tired?

God to Puling Human: Well. Yes. Of course you have. What are you going on about?

Up at 4:30. Write today’s rant. Post it on the one Facebook writers’ group I’ve found that seems to be pretty darned good. Fiddle with the pool. Shower in the backyard hose, wash chlorine out of hair. Feed dogs. Bolt down breakfast.

Paint face. Throw on clothes. Put up damp hair. Fly out the door to Scottsdale. Sit through meeting.

Excused from buying new picture frame by son, who found one in his garage to replace the one that broke when it fell off the wall. Convenient, because it means I don’t have to hang around Paradise Valley after the meeting until Aaron Bros opens at 10 a.m.

Stop at Sprouts to buy a couple of grocery items on the way home. Starved: cook up some pasta as a snack.

La Maya invites me over to talk, lunch, and paint (or, in my case, draw).  Get a little work done here and then head to her place. Have incredible RM food (RM: that would the Real Mexican) for lunch, beside self with joy. Discuss life, the universe, and all that, “all that” including politics, academia, business, and art.

She suggests that where marketing is concerned, the better part of valor is face-to-face contact, NOT social media. Together we dream up the idea that I should approach Changing Hands, the only independent bookstore that still thrives in the Valley, and offer to do a workshop (they throw these things all the time) on some aspect of self-publishing. In the act, I peddle my wares to the attendees.

We also propose that I should compile another bookoid, to be produced in PoD format and distributed at these proposed shindigs, that would be filled with tips for writers and self-publishers. I realize I already have enough material to generate such a creature. Easily.

Furthermore, we consider the possibility that I should offer a service course along the same lines for one of the local junior colleges. This, she suggests, would create a small market for all the non-naughty bookoids (we think the naughty ones had better not be suggested to the minions of the local community college district): chances are good that most of the students would buy the things, especially if they could be offered at a deep discount for a week or two during the courselet’s duration.

This, I think, is an exceptionally good idea. Especially if one of the bookoids is the proposed compendium of writing tips. 🙂

Back at the Funny Farm, now I sift through the entire body of Plain & Simple Press posts, dating back to early 20 and ought-14. Come up with 48,950 words.

Not bad. I’ll need about 80,000 words, so am almost 5/8 of the way there. Some passages can be expanded upon — for example, a live link to some article somewhere else can be replaced with a precis of the article. An introduction will add about 1,500 or 2 ,000 words. And I have in print an entire textbook of writing advice, from which I intend to self-plagiarize liberally.

If Melania can rip off the First Lady, I surely can rip off myself.

Next, I open an email from Amazon, responding to my demand to know why TF the 99-cent sale of the six books I put up for countdown sales didn’t work. Amazon’s factotum informs me that the countdown sale is in effect: it was set to start at 3:00 p.m.

Ohhhkaaayyy… I check a couple of the books and find that indeed by then they are showing as available for 99 cents.

But on reflection, I’m pretty sure that even though these old eyes need a pair of glasses to read a damned computer screen accurately, and even though a 3 looks sort of like an 8, I still can tell the difference between a 3 and an 8 and between a letter a and a letter p. No problem. The difference is sterling clear. I do not believe for one effing minute that I entered 3 p.m. instead of 8 a.m. SIX GODDAMN TIMES. But whatever. It looks like the sale is now online, even though I’ve lost the advantage of making it available for 99 cents on the entire first day of the goddamn sale.

Just about to throw it in when a message comes over from Jackie: How come the cookbook is still selling for $9.99?

Shee-ut! Damned if it ain’t.

I open the Amazon factotum’s email by way of sending another annoyed inquiry when I discover that down near the bottom, well below the fold, she claims I never set up the 30 Pounds / 4 Months book for the Countdown Sale.

That, alas, is flat out not so.

The 30# book was the first one I set up. I remember it well because the annoyance factor was so high. After I screwed around with that, figuring out how to operate the software to create the sale, I moved on to Cabin Fever and set up all five of the naughty books. Then, I posted my ads on Twitter and several Facebook sites, merrily crowing that the books would go on sale on June 21.

Later, when I got a notice from Kindle reminding me that I’d made all these arrangements, I discovered that the sales were scheduled for JULY 21, not June 21.

Re-entering the website and navigating back to the place to set things up, I found to my amazement that the drop-down month calendar where you have to select the start day was a JULY calendar, not June — a bit of a surprise, since I did this on June 10, and so naively assumed the calendar they shoved in my face to be the June calendar.

Experimentation showed there was no choice of any other month: it was July or nothing. So I had to go back into each of the books I’d already set up, to confirm that in fact the date Amazon had arrogated was July 21, not the June 21 I believed I was selecting.

I think I would have noticed if I hadn’t set up a sale for the 30# book. If I’d opened 30# on the “Bookshelf,” which I most certainly would have done — first, since that’s the one I expected to make money and that’s also the only one for which an inane “countdown” sale can work effectively — I would have noticed if I’d never set up the sale.

Then I had to go back to each of the two ads, change the dates in PowerPoint, convert to PDF, convert to TIF, crop the TIF, resize the TIF, convert to JPEG, and repost all the ads I’d put everywhere on the goddamn social media. This annoyance was also something I would have noticed.

Really, dealing with Amazon is the sh!ts. Some damnfool thing happens EVERY TIME you try to do something. There’s always some complication, some unnecessary hassle, some mindless pointless restriction that makes your life difficult, SOMETHING. And every, single, goddamn time you respond to one of these by trying to do a workaround, that screws you up even worse!

Not ONE thing that I’ve attempted on Amazon, from trying to create a Goodreads Author Page to trying to establish a pseudonym for Roberta Stuart, has worked without some kind of headache or hassle. NOTHING is simple at Amazon. NOTHING works in any sensible way.

If Bernie would please bring back the antitrust laws, I personally would lead a coup* to clean out all the airheaded Republicans and Democrats and install the man as king.
_________

*Dude, little CIA factotum: it’s a joke.

The (not-so-much!) Joys of Amazon

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I’ve about had it with Amazon. Honest to God, every effin’ time I try to do anything with any book on Amazon, I end up with my hands full of sh!t. This time? Well. Sumbeach, that’s about as articulate as I can get right this instant.

How about a couple of pictures, each worth a thousand words?

Cookbook

Naughty June 2016

I’ve posted these things, plus promotional copy and links, on websites, Facebook pages, Facebook Groups, and Twaddle from here to Hell and onward to Gone, day after day after brain-banging, mind-numbing DAY over the ten days or two weeks.

NINE Facebook pages and groups plus Twitter have been urging people to hurry on over to Amazon and buy these astonishingly wonderful books as dawn cracks on Thursday, July 21. Posts at these nine sites have gone up every single day, along with associated posts that gave me a chance to mention the alleged sale, EVERY DAY for the past day after day after endless day.

Understand: because no two FB pages or groups seem to post the same way, you end up dorking and dorking and dorking around to get them to do what you want. One page will respond to an inserted URL by inserting the web post with the image that appears closest to the top. Another will try to insert ALL the images in the post. Yet another will slap in the images in the righthand sidebar, which bear no relation at all to the content you’re trying to plug on FB. And still another will insert nothing. So for about 99% of them, you have to delete incorrect data and then go into your computer, track down the correct images, and  insert them. Then at Twitter you have to write all new promo copy, because of Twitter’s frustrating word count limitation, which is crimped even further by the need to add hashtags. And by the fact that Twitter reduces the character allowance to account for the size of the attached image. To minimize that, you have to convert your URL to Bitly, another time suck.

At one point, I figured the average number of time-wasting search-and-clicks per Facebook posting was 8. So 8 x 9 = 72 endless click-search-click-search-search-clicks per posting!!!! PER AD. There are two ads involved here.

Even if you’re pasting the promotional copy into each Facebook page/group (which cannot do for all of them), this process adds up to about two hours of mind-numbing computer diddling-around. Per session.

Multiply that by ten days, and you come up with a conservative(!) estimate of about 20 hours spent on this annoying, excruciatingly boring task.

So comes dawn’s early light today, I go on Amazon to check…because, you know, during this whole exercise a still small voice in the back of my mind has been nagging, whaddaya bet? whaddaya bet? Well. If I were a betting woman, I would’ve bet that Amazon would once again give me the shaft.

And I’d have been right.

Naturally, not one of the six books I’d set up for the Amazon Countdown Sale promo program offered any kind of markdown.

Well, except for the “take it for FREE” offer for those who subscribe to Amazon’s free borrowing program. That’s the one where Amazon spies on you to see how many pages you’ve clicked through. If the reader doesn’t “look” (snark!) at enough pages, the author doesn’t get paid. Yeah. Readers “buy” the book but the author doesn’t get paid.

Not that you get paid much in the “borrow” program anyway. You get a fraction of what you’d get if the person bought the book at the ludicrously tiny amount you can get away with charging for an e-book.

IMHO, Amazon is the single worst thing that has ever happened to publishing and to creative work.

Yes, it lets every would-be hobbyist writer get his or her work in front of a (mostly imaginary) public. And yes, it lets everyone get around the gatekeepers at real publishing houses.

But you know: those gatekeepers served a purpose. They knew (still do know) what sells and what doesn’t sell. When they decided to accept or reject a proposal or a manuscript, it was based on some real insight not just into the intrinsic quality of the work but also into its marketability. Even with those gatekeepers, if you’ve ever gone to a charitable book sale or a used book store, you’ll see that the market is simply awash in books, books, books, and more books: many more books than any single reader or even a group of readers could reasonably keep up with.

But now the market is more than awash. It’s DROWNING. It’s fuckin’ SUBMERGED in dreck! I just read a “published” book by some wannabe Great Writer of the Western World that’s full of punctuation errors, spelling errors, and…oh hell. The idea is good. It’s a salable concept. But the published bookoid is a mess:  the copy has apparently never been graced by either a copyeditor or a proofreader.

Both of those, BTW, were provided as a matter of course, free to the author, by real publishing houses.

Amazon single-handedly has degraded the overall quality of literature available to the public, destroyed the publishing industry, and further impoverished the lot of writers and artists.

And if you weren’t already wasting your time “publishing” (le mot juste is something more like “posting”) books that no publisher’s editor in hir right mind would look at twice, you get to waste it anyway jumping through Amazon’s endless “promotional” hoops to no avail.

“Disruption” is just a techno-euphemism for “destruction.”

Here’s what I’m gonna do:

I will leave the 40 or so books we have on Amazon there, since they generate all of about $12 a month…well, in a good month.

But meanwhile, I will convert them all to ePub (which I should have done in the first place!) and post them all on Smashwords — assuming I don’t have to pay through the schnozzola to get an e-book formatting expert to do the formatting so that SW will accept it. If I can’t, then I will post them all to Barnes & Noble. And I will post the Camptown Races bookoids at an online retailer that specializes in “romantic erotica” (no kidding: who knew?).

Then I am going to forget about it. If they sell themselves, bully. If not, WGAS. All of the energy and all of the time I’ve spent on trying to create and sell books? That will be fully diverted into trying to sell editorial and indexing services.

The Copyeditor’s Desk has been supporting this folly. It’s about time it started supporting me, instead.